SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended his company’s ban on President Donald Trump in a philosophical Twitter thread that’s his first public statement on the topic.
When Trump urged his followers to storm the Capitol last week and then continued to tweet potentially ominous messages, Dorsey said the resulting risk to public safety created an “extraordinary and unsustainable circumstance” for the company. After Trump’s account was briefly suspended on the day of the Capitol riot, Twitter banned Trump completely on Friday, then precipitated the president’s attempts to tweet with other accounts.
“I’m not proud that we had to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, and I’m not proud of it,” Dorsey wrote. But he added, “I believe this was the right decision for Twitter.”
Dorsey acknowledged that displays of power, such as the ban on Trump, can set dangerous precedents and even call them a sign of “failure.” While not in so many words, Dorsey suggested that Twitter should find ways to avoid making such decisions in the first place. Exactly how that would work is unclear, although it could range from earlier and more effective moderation to a fundamental restructuring of social networks.
In Dorsey-speak, this means that Twitter has to work harder to “ promote healthy conversation. ”
Extreme measures such as banning Trump also highlight the extraordinary power that Twitter and other Big Tech companies can wield without accountability or recourse, Dorsey wrote.
While Twitter grappled with Trump’s problem, Apple, Google and Amazon, for example, shut down the right-wing site Parler. by denying it access to app stores and cloud hosting services. The companies claimed that Parler was not aggressive enough to remove calls for violence, which Parler has denied.
Dorsey refused to directly criticize his Big Tech counterparts, even commenting that “this moment might require this dynamic.” In the long run, however, he suggested that aggressive and domineering behavior could threaten the “noble purpose and ideals” of the open Internet by entrenching the power of a few organizations over a commons that should be accessible to all.
However, Twitter’s co-founder had little specific to say about how his platform or other Big Tech companies could avoid such choices in the future. Instead, he touched on an idea that, taken literally, sounds a bit like the end of Twitter itself – a long-term project to develop a technological ‘standard’ that could free social networks from centralized control by Facebook and Twitter.
But right now, Dorsey wrote, Twitter’s goal is “to disarm as much as possible and to ensure that we all build a greater common understanding and a more peaceful existence on Earth.”